Public Participation and Intra-Actions in the Swedish Energy Transition

Abstract

The Swedish government has been an ambitious contributor to the sustainability discourse. Especially in its attempts to make citizens aware of human-induced climate change, create compliance, and speed up solutions, notably by the commercialization of renewable energy technology. In this merger of ecological modernization and democratic deliberation, we investigate an implementation of the Triple and Quadruple Helix innovation models. Despite an inclusion of ‘civil society’ in the latter, we expose how the commercialization in these models fails to encompass sustainability, which has motivated a development of the so-called Quintuple Helix model. We contribute to this development by turning to posthuman theory, specifically the work of Karen Barad. We thus advance the Quintuple Helix and thereby align it more fully with calls for sustainability by a shift in focus, from ‘interactions’ to studies of ‘intra-actions’. Our shift questions what we find to be a rather too idealized, causal, and static innovation model, and lets us analytically affirm how an innovation and commercialization process unfolds through the human–non-human nexus. We conclude that our approach allows a better understanding of the non-linearity and uncertainty involved in the implementation of innovation systems.